Artificial Intelligence for Business Development – Are We Doing It Right?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere these days, and if you are involved with B2G Business Development (BD) you are probably using it, perhaps often, even if you did not intend to. Almost all the BD data providers we go to for information are interjecting it into their products to one degree or another. Some to help you search for opportunities, some to help you identify potential competitors, some to build response outlines, and some to help write an entire proposal. All of which sounds worthwhile, and it is, but in every case, you are dependent on how well the AI has been trained. -- Yes, without good training an AI is just an answer machine without a quality filter – and that can be worse than no AI at all.
In most cases, today’s AI driven applications or internal functions (like searching for opportunities inside a data vendors system) train themselves on limited data they can find about your firm. For some of the AI applications you can license for your use, you can feed it lots of information about your firm, but do you really know what the essential information is and how to best structure it to get the results you want?
Perhaps an AI driven tool with an expert in BD driving would provide better answers? Let’s take an example in a critical area where lots of vendors are offering AI assistance – searching for the opportunities best suited to your firm. What are the current tools doing? For the most part, they are looking at your history. Who did you work for before, and what work did you do? The answer to the first question is generally easy to find out. For the second question you would want the tool to look beyond just the title and NAICS/PSC codes for the work and really dive into the actual SOW, something some of them can do if they can find the paperwork. Given, however, the amount of work that firms have under Task Orders and Subcontracts, unless the tool provides a mechanism for you to feed it, what it knows about you might be limited. Still, sounds like it could be better than just going off searches your team sets up – maybe.
Now, let’s look at it from the point of view of a CLEVER expert. Using CLEVER, the expert knows that we don’t want to just search, we want to do a critical analysis of how well the opportunity fits our plans – and often our plans are going to have elements that deviate from our history – oops. Our friendly AI probably didn’t know that☹ The CLEVER expert, who interacts with the CLEVER Smart Selector AI, knows the AI wants the CLEVER Go-To-Market Strategy (GTMS) input along with the company history. And he will help you build it by inputting the answers to questions like:
Do you want to offer new services you do not offer today? If yes, how are those services defined in terms of required capabilities?
Are you going to build and offer some new products? What is the capability and how does it fit into the government’s needs?
How does the government define its needs by market categories, and what are the capabilities it looks for in each market – think expanded GSA Category Management.
Do you have certain skill sets within your staff that you want to emphasize in looking for work because it will improve the strength of your bid?
Do you want to broaden your customer base? If so, to which agencies, and in what priority order are they important to your expansion?
While your historical work is under certain NAICS and PSC codes, will your new offerings shift emphasis, and if so, what codes do you now want to increase your presence within?
What are your growth targets for next year and for a 5-year horizon, and how will that affect the size of contracting opportunities by prime and subcontracts you will want to look at?
Do you feel your geographic presence plays a role in your ability to market your offerings, and if it does, what are your geographic priorities?
Who are your major competitors today, and who will be your major competitors as you move forward?
Do you have certain preferences in terms of solicitation types and contract funding types that you want to consider when looking at opportunities?
What access do you have to vehicle/multi-award IDIQs; do you have Mentor-Protégé or other JV relationships; what do your current teaming relationships look like; what access do you have to socioeconomic opportunities
- are you tired yet?
Yes, CLEVER has a place for all of this, and your expert will work with you when you come on board to create your GTMS Profile – and keep it updated. Why, because that pesky AI in the Smart Selector is going to use it to build searches and analyze results to make sure you get the best of the best fits to pursue (invest in) and bid on. Great, but what does that really mean? Perhaps the best way to illustrate the point is to look at what the AIs produce – theirs vs. CLEVER.
Theirs – obviously we cannot show you, that would violate copyrights. So, we encourage you to go take a look. We believe you will find most of these systems return a list of opportunities they say fit the criteria you gave them for your search, typically some keywords, agency choices, NAICS, the typical stuff, but the AI comes in when the system tries to compare your history to the identified opportunities.
CLEVER – you might notice a few pieces of information analyzing and scoring various characteristics about the opportunity as it compares to your GTMS. You will even see it score every one of your business services individually, it exams the overall market fit (something that drives how well suited you are to prime the deal), along with a detailed mapping to skill sets, and various other factors. There are 11 factors overall, each with its own weighting, and within the weightings for capabilities, every skill set has its own priority. You will also notice that it keeps track of every score it develops for you so it can dynamically change range values for the overall score as your selection history grows. It’s an AI that answers your question – what should I pursue?
CLEVER Smart Selector Display
Now, back to our AI discussion. Do you see a difference between what an expert, working collaboratively with an AI can do vs. one that is built by technologists to function as a generic tool designed for everyone. We can have the same discussion on AI assisted strategies, or AI assisted proposals. Proposal writing tools are all over the place now. They are definite time savers, but the impact on the product is, again, limited in critical ways.
Do you ever wonder why you hear so many complaints about the award going to the lowest bidder despite being best value? Could it be that everyone’s technical approach is so similar the government has a hard time telling them apart, combined with the fact that everyone’s responding to the same outline with the same font in the same size with the same spacing – same, same, same! Reality check, most of the time there is nothing left for the government to separate you by other than the price.
This is why we believe storytelling (which gets lip service more than anything else), information visualization (yes, appearance, but also layout – and we don’t mean margins), and learning theory (what helps different types of readers better absorb the story) have more of an impact on overcoming the low bidder than the technical content does. These are topics worth exploring in more detail, but the point here is that AI can save you time, and it can help get you into the game, but AI that collaborates with expertise becomes something far more powerful. If you consider that it is possible to get this combination at a price that is significantly less than your internal cost to do the same thing, and get a better result, does exploring your needs make sense? Ask us.